Left-over days for Gwyneth, with Chloe gone.
Chloe goes to Ulden to visit her mother. She takes Inigo, aged eight. Oliver has bought Gwyneth the cottage next to the Rose and Crown, and now Gwyneth sleeps there and spends her day off cleaning its floors, and is not noticeably grateful for the change in her circumstances.
On this particular Sunday, the Leacocks are off to Italy on holiday. Gwyneth has, for once, been left formally in charge, and not just unofficially. The Rose and Crown flourishes: it has twenty beds, ten bathrooms, not enough fire escapes and a restaurant with a good wine list and a Spanish chef and Portuguese waiters. The public bar has been swept away, along with good cheap local beer, and the spirit of the Cosy Nook extends throughout the premises; somewhat plushed up, of course, with rosy mock Victoriana replacing the faded maroon original.
Gwyneth earns four pounds a week plus meals. A five hundred per cent increase on her original salary, as Mrs Leacock emphasizes. Gwyneth rises these days at seven and goes to bed at twelve. The girls who work under her earn double what she does, but Gwyneth seems to take a pride in the lowness of her wage.
‘Only four pounds a week,’ she says, with awe. ‘They wouldn’t get anyone for that now.’
Although she is always pleased to see Chloe, and delights in Inigo, she seems uninterested in Chloe’s London life. Chloe is half relieved, half hurt. It was as if, with her marriage, she has become a stranger to her mother.
And indeed – living with, getting pregnant by, and marrying Oliver, without her mother’s knowledge, let alone permission, were not deeds calculated to increase the bond between them. Rather it was to loosen it – with that destructive instinct for self-determination which the loving daughters of loving mothers sometimes so alarmingly exhibit. And loosen it, it did.
Gwyneth has understood and forgiven. But she keeps her daughter at a distance now.
‘The girls are so slip-shod,’ she complains to Chloe. ‘They have no standards. You have to watch them all the time,’ and although it’s her day off she takes Chloe to lunch in the restaurant, instead of cooking for her in the cottage, so that she can keep an eye on the staff, the food, and the guests.
Gwyneth makes excuses.
‘I do hardly any cooking in the cottage,’ she says. ‘I can never get used to cooking food for myself. All that work and only me to appreciate it. Besides, if I eat by myself I get indigestion. It’s the quietness, it worries me. I like a bit of clatter and a shout or two, and even an argy-bargy, so long as it doesn’t turn nasty!’
The waiter brings Inigo a mountain of chips, especially prepared for him in the kitchen. He’s pleased by this special attention and smiles benignly at his mother and grandmother. He is a beautiful, clear-eyed child. Chloe feels such a pure clarity of love for Inigo, at this age, that it pierces her with almost more pain than any Oliver has ever caused her. Chloe picks at gammon and pineapple. She does not have much appetite, these days.
Chloe When you retire, mother, you’ll have to be a little more on your own. Do try and get used to the cottage.
Gwyneth (Horrified) I mean to work until I drop.
Chloe But why? You don’t have to work any more. And if you’re getting varicose veins—
Gwyneth Only little ones—
Chloe And if your insides are giving trouble—
Gwyneth has complained to Chloe that occasionally, though past the menopause, she bleeds a little from time to time.
Gwyneth If I forget about it it will go away.
She asks after Marjorie. Gwyneth has seen her name on the television screen – albeit low down on the credits – and is pleased to know she is doing well.
Gwyneth Such a bright girl. So were you all, bright as buttons
She asks with some temerity after Grace. Tales of Grace are often cataclysmic.
Chloe Grace? Litigating.
Gwyneth That should keep her out of trouble for a while. And little Stanhope? What a name to call a baby!
Chloe He’s with me most of the time. Well, with the au pair.
Gwyneth I expect it’s for the best, though it’s hard on you. She never sounded the best of mothers, to me. Leaving the poor little thing alone like that.
Grace goes out drinking, one night, leaving the sleeping two-year-old Stanhope locked in the flat. He wakes, is terrified, dials telephone numbers at random, gets through to the Continental Exchange, who keep him soothed and reassured while the call is traced and help summoned. When Grace comes home at three with a Nigerian in national dress there are the police, the NSPCC and a Children’s Department official waiting for her.
Poor Grace. Everyone gets to hear about it. Even Gwyneth, tucked away in Ulden.
Poorer Stanhope.
Grace consents to let Chloe have Stanhope. She has never cared for him. It was Chloe who talked Grace out of having an abortion so it seems only fair that Chloe should put up with the consequences.
Gwyneth Poor Grace. Poor little Grace. She always seemed to have so much and really it was nothing.
She puts her hand on Chloe’s arm and strokes it, with a brief return of the passionate, protective love she once had for her child.
Gwyneth I’m glad things are all right for you. I did my best for you but it wasn’t much. I don’t deserve what you’ve turned out to be. And Oliver doesn’t mind about you having Stanhope?
Chloe No. He has a great respect for Patrick Bates.
Gwyneth (With unaccustomed asperity) I can’t think why. I must say I could never see his charm. It was a bad day when he was posted here. I wish he’d been sent to Aberdeen. Upsetting all you girls the way he did. And that poor wife of his, I don’t know why she puts up with it.
Chloe He’s very creative.
Inigo has been taken off by a waiter to inspect the ice-cream stores. At the table next to theirs four grey-suited men with competent, choleric faces grow impatient because their steaks take so long to arrive.
Gwyneth excuses herself, and vanishes into the kitchen. Gwyneth’s rump is broad and solid, her waist vanished into stolid flesh. If she was ill, thinks Chloe, surely she’d be thin? The steak appears at the next table: the four men eat. Gwyneth returns, satisfied.
Gwyneth Creative! What kind of excuse is that? Your father was creative, and he did what he had to for his family. He knew real life came first. The other is make believe.
Chloe (Flatly) Father died. If he’d gone on painting pictures and not the outside of houses, he might still be alive.
Gwyneth It was the choice he made, and the right choice. You’ve got to live by ought, not want.
Chloe No. People should do what they want. If they don’t it just means trouble for everyone.
It is the nearest they have ever come to an argument. Gwyneth’s mouth tightens. Chloe moistens her lips. She feels an unaccountable rage with her mother. The four men at the next table are in discussion with the waiter, who presently sidles up to Gwyneth.
Waiter That’s the new management. Sneaky bastards, the Leacocks. They’ve gone and sold the place. I don’t suppose they told you either.
Gwyneth turns pale. She looks as Chloe remembers her looking twenty-five years earlier, when she came home a widow from the Sanatorium, having left the house a wife.
And that is what the Leacocks have done. Sold the Rose and Crown as a going concern to a big chain of hotels. And why not? It’s what the Leacocks always meant to do: and he is sixty and she is fifty-five, and Gwyneth should have seen it coming. And if they did not confide in her – well, why should they? Gwyneth is only an employee.
So Gwyneth tells herself, as once she told herself that there was no good reason why Chloe, a grown woman now, should ask her to her wedding. And telling herself often enough, convinces herself, and when the Leacocks return from holiday, Gwyneth smiles at them, and when they leave for Wales, within the month, giving her a lampshade as a farewell present, she waves good-bye and promises to write, and only when the following week the new management replace her with a younger woman from another hotel, and she finds herself unemployed, she wonders briefly why the Leacocks have not seen fit to safeguard her position. Twenty years!
Gwyneth sits in her little cottage and thinks of nothing in particular for a long time, and next time Chloe goes to visit her, she complains of stomach pains and Chloe tries to get her to go to the doctor but she won’t.
‘It’s the change in diet,’ she says, ‘it’s nothing. I’m very happy here and all sorts of people pop in to see me, you mustn’t worry about me, Chloe. And I had such a nice postcard from the Leacocks – they’ve bought a little house in Malta.’
‘Those monsters,’ says Chloe.
‘You mustn’t say that about them,’ says Gwyneth. ‘They’ve always been very good to me.’
‘They’ve exploited you for years,’ shouts Chloe. ‘They’ve conned you and laughed at you, and you asked for it. You’ve stood around all your life waiting to be trampled on. Can’t you even be angry? Can’t you hate them? Where’s your spirit?’
She stamps and storms at her mystified mother. It is the worst of her times. Oliver has been out with Patrick for the last two nights. Out prowling like any tomcat, bent on nocturnal mysteries. If I love him, Chloe tells herself, I’ll let him do what he wants, and a jealous wife is an abomination; and listening to herself, believes herself. Not for nothing is she her mother’s daughter. When Oliver comes home she’ll smile and make a pot of coffee and tell him who’s phoned and who she’s seen.
It drives him mad. His trousers are stained with semen; he hasn’t even bothered to take them off, then, or else he’s been too drunk. Chloe washes them, patiently, with purest, gentlest soap flakes. He’s trying to provoke her. She will not let herself be provoked. Even going to the doctor for treatment for VD she does not permit herself anger, only distress.
Oliver gives up the effort; he stays home, says hard things about Patrick, doesn’t drink, writes another script. Is this victory, or just postponed defeat? Chloe thinks it’s victory. Oliver stares at her with sombre, furious eyes, and says nothing, and at night drives himself and her into the most elaborate and curious of positions, and still she merely smiles, and obliges, and if in the morning she’s bruised and bitten, isn’t that love and didn’t she enjoy it?
In the meantime she has pushed and prodded her mother to the doctor’s. What you want, mother, is a hysterectomy, says Chloe. Get your womb taken out, removed, cut away. Then you’ll be a person, not a woman, and perhaps you’ll get your spirit back from those sad depths to which it has so pitifully sunk.
‘Cancer,’ says the doctor, investigating, and lo, there it is, everywhere.
‘In my young days,’ says Gwyneth’s friend Marion, who keeps the sweet shop, ‘that word was never spoken, and it was better that way. It’s talking about it makes it happen.’